Over the past two days, I was in Dijon CT-scanning European and Asian salamanders from the Specola collection with the invaluable help of Lauriane Poloni at the GISMO imaging platform, University of Bourgogne’s Biogeosciences laboratory. These newly scanned specimens will expand our macroevolutionary dataset, allowing us to investigate how variation in life history and developmental (ontogenetic) trajectories has shaped the evolution of the salamander head. By incorporating these additional species, we hope to gain a deeper understanding of the links between development, life cycle diversity, and morphological evolution across salamanders.
Now comes the next step: segmenting and placing landmarks on these newly scanned specimens before adding them to our ever-growing dataset. It’s a time-consuming process, but each new specimen brings us closer to answering our evolutionary questions. Hopefully, we’ll have some exciting new results to share soon!
Stay tuned!
